Normative environment (expectations and roles)

According to the RAA, individuals’ perception of the normative environment is one of the key constructs that predict their intentions and behavior. Norms refer to mental representations of appropriate (i.e. acceptable or permissible) behavior in a group or society (Parsons, 1964), and therefore guide one’s behaviors. For example, the symbolic interactionist tradition (e.g., Goffman, 1958) suggests that norms provide meaning by structuring the situation and providing guidelines regarding appropriate or inappropriate behavior. This dissertation follows the thinking of Fishbein & Ajzen (2010) in viewing norms as perceived social forces that influence whether an individual is likely to perform a given behavior or not.

In the literature of reasoned action, one of the central constructs is the sub-jective norm (Ajzen 1991; Fishbein & Ajzen, 2010), which refers to an individual’s perception of how important others (e.g. managers) or groups prescribe, desire or expect the performance or non-performance of a specific behavior. These types of norms have also been conceptualized as injunctive norms (what should or ought to be done) and descriptive norms (whether others are performing the be-havior in question or not) (Cialdani, Reno, Kallgren, 1990; Fishbein & Ajzen, 2010).

Fishbein and Ajzen (2010) highlight that although injunctive norms are per-ceived at an individual level, they often concern a behavioral rule or prescription that applies equally to all members of the population that are in a particular role, position or social environment (p. 134). When studying norms and expectations in an organizational context, it is particularly important to understand the collec-tive nature of norms. These colleccollec-tively formed beliefs and expectations toward social media use at work can be assumed to evolve as knowledge about the dif-ferent types of uses and their consequences increases.

When studying work-related communication behavior, it is important to acknowledge the contractual nature of work and particularly workplace roles that convey normative beliefs. Here, role theory (Biddle & Thomas, 1966) be-comes helpful in explaining how the changes in norms and expectations affect changes in beliefs and behavior among knowledge workers. According to role theory, roles emerge from expectations within a particular context (Katz & Kahn, 1978). In the context of work, roles have typically been divided into two catego-ries. In-role behaviors refer to expected behaviors that directly contribute to the core production of the organization (Katz, 1964; Van Scotter et al., 2000). On the

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other hand, employees voluntarily enact extra-role behaviors, which are not for-mally required by the job (Bolino, 1999; Grant and Mayer, 2009). Behaviors that include exceeding formal job requirements are often referred to as organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB), meaning “individual behavior that is discretionary, not directly or explicitly recognized by the formal reward system, and that in aggregate promotes the effective functioning of the organization” (Organ, 1988 p. 4).

Employees’ communication on social media is largely viewed as voluntary, extra-role behavior (e.g. Helm, 2011; Lee, 2020), and it is often defined as an ex-tension of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) (Schaarschmidt & Könsgen, 2019). This is not to say that organizational expectations or other sources of nor-mative guidance have not been acknowledged in the existing literature. Studies certainly suggest that employees may be extrinsically guided to use social media for work-related purposes (e.g., Hansen & Levin, 2016; Leftheriotis & Giannakos, 2014) and may feel normative pressure to do so (Walden, 2018), but despite these recent findings, employees’ communicative role has still been predominantly conceptualized as extra-role behavior, meaning behavior that the employee vol-untarily chooses to enact or not.

This dissertation identifies two main reasons why the conceptualization has not been questioned before (see also article IV). The first relates to the history of employees’ communicative role, which has changed fundamentally in recent years in accordance with the post-Fordist organization and the emergence of dig-ital communication technologies (Alvesson, 2004; Andersson; 2020). The second reason relates to the history of the conceptualization, which can be traced back to an article by Van Dyne, Graham & Dienesch (1994), where they discuss repre-sentative behaviors and conceptualize them as OCB. Since then, employees' com-munication behavior has been predominantly conceptualized in the literature as an extra-role behavior (Organ, 1977), and one that is seldom included in formal job descriptions.

However, the recent literature suggests that the entanglement of social me-dia in working life has created new expectations toward employees’ social meme-dia use for work-related purposes (Andersson, 2019; Walden, 2018; see also article III), which has further driven the formalization of employees’ communicative role (Andersson, 2019; Madsen & Verhoeven, 2019; Pekkala & Luoma-aho, 2017).

As Andersson (2020) posits, “employees’ communication role and communica-tion responsibility increasingly explicitly present dimensions of employees’ work, regardless of whether or not management attempts to formalize the communica-tion role” (p. 17). This indicates that the normative environment is changing, and hence the time is ripe to examine whether the increased normative guidance to enact these behaviors has led employees themselves to perceive their behaviors as an expected part of their work (in-role behavior), or as voluntary behaviors that exceed job requirements (extra-role behavior), in order to understand the motivational basis of employees’ communication behavior (Morrison, 1994). This research gap has been addressed in article IV.

35 2.3.3 Behavioral control (self-efficacy)

According to the RAA, perceived behavioral control refers to the perceived con-trol over performance of the behavior (Fishbein & Ajzen, 2010 p. 154). The idea is based on Bandura’s concept of self-efficacy, which in turn has its roots in social cognitive theory (Bandura, 1997). Bandura (1991, p. 257) has defined perceived self-efficacy as people’s beliefs about their capabilities to exercise control over their own level of functioning, and over events that affect their lives. This belief is argued to take into account the availability of information, skills, opportunities, and other resources required to perform the behavior (Bandura, 2007; Fishbein &

Ajzen, 2010).

Bandura’s self-efficacy theory posits that self-efficacy affects the selection of activity, such that individuals who perceive themselves as having the ability to successfully engage in a given behavior will be more likely to perform that havior. Conversely, individuals are not willing to engage in behaviors if they lieve they will end in failure. Therefore, self-efficacy influences the respective be-havior (Bandura, 1997). Self-efficacy differs from competence in that the former is an individual’s belief in their own ability (Bandura, 1986), whereas competence is often regarded as another person’s evaluative judgement of one’s behavior (Roloff & Kellerman, 1984). This dissertation focuses on social media cation (SMC) self-efficacy, referring to employees’ beliefs about their communi-cation abilities on social media, as a predictor of their work-related social media communication behavior (see also article V).

Self-efficacy and Bandura’s (1997) socio-cognitive theory have been used to understand the role of self-efficacy in relation to digital technology use (Hocevar, Flanagin & Metzger, 2014; Kim, & Glassman, 2013; Mew & Money, 2010; Sun &

Wu, 2011; Xu, Yang, Macleod, & Zhu, 2019). The majority of studies have pre-dominantly focused on users’ technical abilities instead of communication and content creation capabilities. Additionally, research that would center on em-ployees’ social media use in a work context has been lacking. In this dissertation the focus is primarily on efficacy beliefs that are related to content creation and the strategic use of social media for professional purposes (van Deursen et al., 2019). By addressing employees’ social media communication self-efficacy (arti-cle V), it is possible to gain knowledge as to whether employees consider them-selves to be prepared and capable of taking over the new communicative roles described in the previous chapter. Hence, this will provide important insights into current communicative capabilities in relation to new communicative forms of knowledge work.

2.4 Management of employees’ social media communication This dissertation focuses on employees’ work-related communication on social media, examining this type of communicative work from a corporate communi-cation management perspective in particular. The term management is broadly

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defined here as including leadership (Mintzberg, 2009) and is understood as a function of design, in the sense that authority is used to create conditions for in-dividual behavior in an organizational context (Kuhn, 2008; see also article III p.

552). To understand the constantly evolving environment in which organizations are functioning, it is helpful to look at the field of management as a continuum of several paradigms, as each paradigmatic approach offers its own solutions to questions such as the division and organization of labor, and the roles of em-ployer and employee. Hence, giving a short overview of different management paradigms will provide an explanation for why the systems perspective was con-sidered suitable in analyzing the changes in corporate communication in this dis-sertation.

The classical management approach consisting of writings by Taylor (1911), Fayol (1916) and Weber (1947) can be seen as the beginning of organizing work and its content. This is often called traditional organizing and the focus is on the planning of work and the improvement of productivity through management control. During the 1920s, greater attention began to be paid to the social factors at work and to the behavior of employees within an organization. A new para-digm duly emerged and the human relations approach began to evolve, with writers such as McGregor (1960), Maslow (1943) and Herzberg (1966) focusing on motivation at work, with the result that these fields of practice are commonly called behavioral management. The principal idea in these approaches was that managing personnel requires detailed knowledge of individual employees in terms of their attitudes and emotions, for instance.

The third management approach introduced here, the systems approach, emerged with an attempt to reconcile the earlier approaches (classical and human relations) in order to encourage managers to view the organization both as a whole and as a part of a larger environment. Systems theory as such has its ori-gins outside management science and the term was used for the first time in 1951 by biologist Ludvig von Bertalanffy. He later named his approach general sys-tems theory (GST). The syssys-tems approach provides a holistic lens with which to examine organizational behavior and its management because it recognizes the role of the interdependencies between agency, material and social in organizing and constructing reality. According to the approach, a system is made up of com-ponents that function systemically, meaning that a change in one system can have an effect on the entire system. In contemporary organizations operating in the knowledge sector, in which the employees’ agency and autonomy are central to organizational survival, the components or sub-systems also include the systems in which employees are held accountable through values, meanings and struc-tures that they have initiated through role-taking. Communicative work con-ducted by employees and the management of related behaviors can hence be un-derstood as components of a corporate communication system. Consequently, employees can be seen to enact agency in this system through their reasoned (communication) behavior.

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More explicitly, this dissertation views corporate communication as a socio-technical system (Trist et al., 1963). The socio-socio-technical system approach consid-ers an organization to be composed of a technical system, including both the tools and the knowledge needed to perform the work, and a social system, which re-sults from the combination of people, relationships, culture, and management methods of working in the organization. As the technical system and the social system are highly interdependent, the design of the production system as a whole must consider the impact of technology on the social system in order to achieve maximum effectiveness (Pasmore & Khalsa, 1993 p. 556). For example, in relation to this study, in the digitalized working environment the social and tech-nological systems enable enhanced connectivity, which highlights the role of vis-ibility in organizational and individual performance (Leonardi & Treem, 2020), and which should therefore be taken into consideration when designing condi-tions for contemporary knowledge work. It is worth noting that the socio-tech-nical approach differs significantly from a pure technology approach (Walker &

Guest, 1952) toward systems as it does not regard technology per se as a deter-minant of behavior.

One of the core principles in systems theory relates to equifinality, which refers to the feature of an open system in which “a system can reach the same final state from differing initial conditions and by a variety of paths” (Katz &

Kahn, 1966, p. 66). In practice, this means that although the functioning of the system is disrupted, the change in components or so-called sub-systems may en-able the system to reach its goal. This idea has provided an interesting avenue for this dissertation to explore the way in which organizational representation is es-tablished although the system’s functionality has been changing in the form of the reorganization of communicative work.

The contingency approach, an extension of the systems approach, suggests that an organizational structure and system of management is dependent upon the contingencies of the situation for each particular organization. Contingency thinking could be seen to foster the emergence of strategic management ap-proaches. Indeed, some of the early texts on strategic planning were written by prominent systems scholars, such as Ackoff (1970), Ansoff (1965) and Church-man (1968) (Mingers & White, 2010). The strategic planning approach empha-sized the role of set objectives in directing organizations, and went on to become one of the most central processes in modern management practice (Mintzberg, 1997).

The communication management literature has drawn for the most part on two management literature streams: strategic management (e.g. Minzberg 1997) and the related excellence approach (Peters and Waterman, 1982), focusing on continuous improvement. According to both of these theoretical frameworks, employees have been seen as important assets for organizations, but their moti-vation has not been the locus of the literature among these frameworks (see also article III). Hence, despite the increased interest in employees’ work-related com-munication, its antecedents and contributions to organizational performance and

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outcomes, a holistic understanding of how companies manage employees’ com-munication behavior in social media has been lacking. The literature focusing on social media policies (Banghart et al., 2018; O’Connor et al., 2016; Parker et al., 2019) and “social media governance” to guide employees’ social media use (e.g.

Felix et al., 2017; Macnamara and Zerfass, 2012; Walden, 2018) provides only a narrow view of the ways in which organizations manage their employees’ com-munication, as this type of framework views employees typically either as con-tributing to or as damaging the organizational reputation (Stohl et al., 2017), and has not taken into account how employees are motivated and enabled to com-municate on social media for professional purposes. Article III in this dissertation is among the first to explore the type of management practices that are used to motivate and enable employees' communication behavior, the type of opportu-nities and threats these new communicative roles pose to organizations, and how contemporary organizations are dealing with these.

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The first subsection of this methodology chapter introduces the philosophical un-derpinnings of the study as a whole. The research approach is then discussed, along with the methods for data collection and the analysis carried out in the empirical studies comprising the dissertation. Finally, the chapter discusses mat-ters pertaining to the selected research strategy in order to assess the quality and ethics of the process in which the knowledge is produced.

3.1 Pragmatism as a worldview – a foundation for the research The purpose of this dissertation is to generate new knowledge about employees’

work-related social media communication and its management, in order to un-derstand the distribution of communicative work within the corporate commu-nication system. I look at this phenomenon from the management perspective, and hence this study considers that the field of corporate communication is a subfield of management science. My professional background in corporate com-munication management has allowed me to experience at first hand some of the transformation within the corporate communication system that relates to the adoption of social networking tools in organizations, and particularly their use among organizational members. Therefore, for me, it was clear that the goal of this study would be to contribute to the resolution of genuine problems that have emerged in conjunction with this change, and to equip managers and employees with knowledge about the embeddedness of communicative work within the knowledge economy, and the challenges and opportunities it creates for organi-zations.

The nature of this scientific inquiry builds on a pragmatist worldview char-acterized by its focus on research having a practical value (Wicks & Freeman, 1998). The common commitment of founding pragmatists such as Charles Sand-ers Peirce, William James, John Dewey and George Herbert Mead was the devel-opment of a philosophy of science that is relevant to, and informed by, human

3 METHODOLOGY AND EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE

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experience and practice (Simpson, 2009). Such pragmatists admit that the knowledge of reality is socially bound and each individual is a participant in the social world. So irrespective of whether we are researchers or practitioners, we all “continuously construct and re-construct the social meanings that shape our thought and actions” (Simpson, 2009, p. 1333). Therefore, taking a pragmatist stance in this dissertation, I admit that my previous experience in corporate com-munication management and other social engagements constantly shapes my thinking as a researcher, and has affected the ways in which I have explored and reconstructed meanings within this dissertation.

Pragmatism has been gaining traction among management and organiza-tional researchers in recent years (e.g. Kelemen, Rumens, & Vo, 2019; Martela, 2015; Watson, 2010). One of the reasons for its increasing popularity is that it al-lows scholars to move beyond the clash between (post-)positivist and construc-tivist research methodologies used in management and organization studies, and to overcome their ontological dichotomies through emphasizing the value of knowledge, with the contention that whether knowledge is, in fact, knowledge can be judged by assessing how useful it is (Wicks & Freeman, 1998). As Sayer (1992) states: "…to be practically adequate knowledge must generate expecta-tions about the world and about the results of our acexpecta-tions that are actually real-ised..." (p. 69).

One of the key features of a pragmatist worldview entails viewing the world and the systems in it as continuous. Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), one of the above-mentioned ‘classical pragmatists’, introduced the term syn-echism to refer to a perspective in which the world is viewed in terms of continua rather than binaries, explaining it thus: "The word synechism is the English form of the Greek (synechismos), from (syneches), continuous…, . . . Thus materialism is the doctrine that matter is everything, idealism is the doctrine that ideas are everything, dualism is the philosophy which splits everything in two. In like manner, I have proposed to make synechism mean the tendency to regard eve-rything as continuous."

Viewing the word as continuous explains many of the principles of prag-matism. These include rejecting dichotomous either-or thinking, agreeing that knowledge is generated from person-environment interaction, and viewing knowledge as both constructed and as resulting from empirical discovery. Addi-tionally, pragmatism takes the ontological position of pluralism with its attempt to interconnect the subjective, intersubjective and objective parts of the world, and the epistemological position that there are multiple routes to knowledge.

Scholars espousing the pragmatist worldview often make “warranted assertions”

rather than claims of unvarying truth, which arises from an idea that knowledge is evolutionary (Johnson & Onwuegbuzie, 2004).

According to Johnson & Grey (2010), pragmatism is generally considered to

According to Johnson & Grey (2010), pragmatism is generally considered to